Well, the Tuxies said it was NixOS…
Honestly it’s usually the Arch Cultists that don’t want opinions
I would really like to thank the Arch community for maintaining such a wonderful wiki; it’s great that your nuts-and-bolts approach naturally generates the best documentation. That said, Debian will always be my distro of choice.
I’m officially off of arch now and back on debian, my first and true linux love. I used to love arch for the AUR, but I had a couple of AUR packages that took so long to upgrade, they were basically un-upgradeable. I switched from i3 on X to sway on Wayland at the same time, so I can’t say how much of my issues were that, but various small issues are no longer issues, like better Playstation controller support. And I don’t have to restart every time I update repositories because I’m not constantly upgrading the Linux kernel. And there are so many .deb packages! But sincerely, thank you arch community. I still use the arch wiki.
Debian my beloved
I really like Debian, it’s what I use at work and for servers at home. At least until a few weeks ago when I decided to try NixOS. I’m really liking it so far and am thinking of switching over my other home servers.
i run arch on my workstation because the flexibility of being able to install any given recent software is just too great. Compared to something like debian which i run on my server, it’s great, you just don’t things that are up to date very often. But it’s incredibly stable.
I truly am living the best of both worlds right now.
Mint for me, but the Arch wiki is just the best.
I’ve got a feeling that I leave arch, just to come back to it… Almost a year without Arch.
I presume you know that your account is marked as automated, as a bot
Part of me wants to main Gentoo just to neutralise any arch smug I come across.
But then I remember I don’t really want a 2nd job
Just main NixOS.
I just need to learn Diet Haskell first…
I’m literally in the process of switching my main from Arch to Gentoo now. (Yes it’s taking a while.) And I intend to be even more smug. Bwahahaha!
It’s only a second job if you ever want to add a new app
Actually, only if you want to tune stuff, like selecting from hundreds of USE flags and some may cause trouble, but who can resist.
I don’t get that ‘Gentoo takes forever’ argument. With todays hardware it’s really a non-issue. Just let the updates compile in the background while you do other stuff. My Arch install broke several times, not so my Gentoo. Also, the Gentoo community is really kind and don’t treat you like an idiot for not knowing something.
On the other hand, what’s the benefit of running Gentoo on modern hardware?
The ability to patch packages with little effort ( https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki//etc/portage/patches ) is the main reason I’m currently considering switching to gentoo.
I imagine telling an Arch user you use Gentoo is like telling a Texan that if you cut Alaska into two halves Texas would be the third largest US state.
This thread once again proving that complaints about arch elitism are 1000x more common than actual arch elitism
This guy uses arch btw.No seriously, there’s plenty of arch elitism in this thread alone, And other distros too. You really don’t need to be preemptively defensive about it though.
I just scrolled the whole thread and can’t find any at all, what are you talking about?
Elitism isn’t „I like arch and I think it is good for some stuff”, it’s „I’m smart because I use arch, you’re dumb if you don’t, and any problems you have with it are your fault.”
This would have been the perfect comment if you were from a slightly different instance
Edit: wait there is (was?) an “I use arch btw” instance right? I’m not imagining it?
Gentoo, that’s fun. Brings back a lot of memories from Kindergarten. Let me know when you’re ready to build LFS with the big dogs.
I’m surprised LFS is still around. I used that on my main computer back when Linux kernel versions started with 2.4. it was my third distribution after red hat and Debian
Gentoo is not that bad. Its just arch with a longer install. You still got to read the wiki when installing something and still have to follow the news.
IMO Arch’s defaults (especially w.r.t. audio and fonts) are a little nicer than Gentoo’s, but that’s a pretty minor inconvenience all things considered.
Arch’s defaults haven’t always been good and I’d argue they are still not good enough for users to rely on. As an arch user (im not an arch user) you are expected to not just plug and play everything without checking its configuration matches your system and needs.
arch, rhel, opensuse/fedora
Vanilla Ubuntu (boo! hiss!). It gets the job done and is out of the box usable with easy flatpak installs. It is 2025, there is no need to tinker with a desktop distro unless you’re deploying on ancient or exotic hardware.
I love Ubuntu’s default yaru theme, and gnome extensions. It seems currently the best distro on my Thinkpad which is unfortunately pretty incompatible to most linux distros due to the shitty Qualcomm WLAN drivers.
Plus Ubuntus package repository is pretty robust.
The only negative thing IMO is snaps being kind of iffy. I don’t think they are that bad but they seem a little too forced on the user.
Like Flatpak is kind of default on Fedora but they almost never force them on you.
Hardware isn’t the only thing worth tinkering though. Coonfigur coonfiguring DE and WMs might actually be more productive and efficient in doing things
-1. WSL.
Because everything to do with WSL is negative
If 3 is worse than 1, -1 is better. So I don’t agree with you. WSL is at +∞
Any distribution is better
“Linux heals the heart, no matter the distro”
- Someone.
Recently started using openSUSE Tumbleweed after 15 years of on and off Linux experimentation. I think I’ve finally found the distro to make me stay. :)
I’ve recently switched from Debian to openSUSE Tumbleweed (edit: with KDE) and am extremely impressed, it’s just so polished. German engineering at its finest.
The best way to trigger an Arch user is to use Ubuntu and love it.
I use Mint, by the way.
Same. After Unbuntu and trying Arch and couldn’t figure it out.
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I personally have no issues with it, but a lot of people really dislike things like snaps (seen as reinventing the wheel of flatpaks and using closed source backend to do it no less) and Canonical really sadly does have a history of making some really silly and thoughtless mistakes which were all bad for the Ubuntu community. I can see an understand those arguments’ validity, but I do think they’re just a little silly because there’s far worse companies doing far worse things out there than Canonical.
Anyway, I still like Ubuntu but I know it gets a lot of hate so I like to poke fun. Xubuntu is like my ride-or-die for old hardware.
As someone who’s in the process of moving to an almost fully Linux environment but only has experience using Ubuntu. Is there a lateral alternative or ‘step-up’ distro you would recommend I try given the downsides of Canonical/ubuntu?
I was a primary Kubuntu user for a long time, but I just recently started using EndeavourOS and I’m really liking it so far. It is Arch-based, but a usable system immediately post-install.
If you want start menu and taskbar, Linux Mint. It was based on Ubuntu so under the hood is very similar but the desktop is more Windows like.
If you want a similar experience to Ubuntu then Fedora, which uses the Gnome desktop environment like Ubuntu but without all the Ubuntu changes. Plus Fedora does some things in different ways under the hood so there is a learning experience that is a nice stepping stone rather than being thrown in the deep end.
I tried raw Gnome and hated it. Ubuntu’s changes made it actually usable. At the same time, I don’t really like all those DEs that just mimic XP.
Interesting. I love Vanilla Gnome over Ubuntu’s version. What do you prefer from Ubuntu that I might have overlooked?
The dock/taskbar. Gnome’s default one being hidden in a menu was unpleasant. I did try the dash-to-dock and dash-to-panel extensions, but I preferred Ubuntu’s implementation.
Seconding the Mint suggestion. I started on Ubuntu ~15 years ago, nowadays I run Mint if I need a GUI, or Debian on anything headless
Mint is generally the suggested new go-to for newbies, as I understand it, because it’s probably the closest to Ubuntu but has snaps disabled.
Debian if you’re going for something more pure, but they are a lot less current, albeit more stable due to that.
so Canonical is the Mozilla of Linux…
If you think Mozilla is the canonical of browsers, you’ve been consuming too much of Google’s anti-mozilla propaganda after they announced v3 manifest.
It really isn’t.
My ubuntu server install gives me an ad for Canonical’s “enhanced security” and a Kubernetes ad every time I SSH into it :(
search for the text file used by MOTD and change it to whatever you want.
Or use a distro that doesn’t come with ads
Canonical is what’s wrong.
One word. Snaps
Seven additional words: Apt installing snaps instead of Debian packages
That’s fair, haha
It seems to have become a vehicle to promote Canonical’s paid products. Also it prefers snaps over packages. Also it’s not as good as Mint for those wanting what Ubuntu used to be
If you’re not registered (which is free for non-business use) the GUI softwate updater may tease you with extra security patches you won’t get.
it feels corporatey and it’s not exceptional at anything
Heh, I have two laptops: one with Arch and one with Ubuntu. I like both systems. I guess i like triggering myself.
why did that last sentence sound so sexual 😭😭
“Oh yeah. I’m triggering myself aaaall night long!”
The desktop environment and package manager has a greater effect on your user experience than the distro
I used to use Ubuntu and Mint now I use SteamOS.
How does SteamOS hold up as a daily driver compared to Mint? I always imagined its like a souped up version of steams big picture mode. Is it a good desktop enviroment that comes with ways to manage files and make web app shortcuts?
It ships with KDE so yeah. Pretty good.
It runs KDE Plasma 5. I personally prefer MATE but KDE works too.
Distro and package manager are tightly coupled.
you can choose your de, and with some distros (like arch) your packages don’t come preconfigured. which also makes a lot of difference.
Agree. KDE neon is my daily right now. Very good out of the box. I just had to nuke snaps on it. Plays very nicely on laptops in terms of battery life, noise and temperature. Sleep and hibernate also works very well.
They had to invent a package manager for repackaged debs and GitHub repos. Very elite
ngl, typing paru/yay [description of repo] is faster than downloading and installing the repo. even if you install it with git, you still need to know the git link.
yes. arch is some effort to configure and get working properly, but once it works it’s so nice
(well, it was for me. I respect you if you have your own opinion and distro preferences)
I needed to quickly get something up and running on a laptop so that I could take it in the field. I thought about reinstalling arch for a minute but decided to go with Ubuntu. And you know what? It was good enough. The install was easy peasy, and everything just worked right out of the box. If I was setting up a long term machine I’d probably go with arch, but just to get some shit done on a timeline? Yeah, turned out Ubuntu was good enough.
too many possible things can go wrong with installers, with arch I know I’ll get it working faster if even the slightest issue occurs which would otherwise derail installer distros 🤷♂️
In roughly 7 years of Linux, I think I’ve only run into issues with automated installers in partitioning if you choose to just go automatic everything and you have a wacky existing partition layout.
In roughly 30 linux of Linux I’ve seen a lot more than partitioning go wrong in automated installers.
I have been using Linux for a long time. I have installed many distributions, many different distributions. I can’t say I have ever had a problem with installers except:
- Unsupported hardware, especially in kernel versions 2.4.*
- Non-free wifi on Debian on laptops
- Less than ideal partitioning on automatic, so I haven’t let it auto partition much since red hat in the 2000s. I let Mint auto partition my wife’s machine recently and that went fine.
Do you have super odd hardware? Do your computers lie to the installer about present hardware?
idk man I’ve been using linux since before we began recording the passage of time and automated installers are, you know… fine? There can be issues, sure, but its pretty damn rare on modern hardware that they aren’t the result of a config issue which can be sorted out in the bios (or similar). This is the Arch elitism that everyone complains about; just because something is easy doesn’t mean that it’s somehow bad.
Doesn’t have to be Arch, as long as I can do the commands by hand instead of trusting whoever built the installer. I used Gentoo many years ago as well for the same reasons.
Distros like Arch simply make doing that very accessible when you are so intimately familiar with the process that an installer feels more like an obstacle than doing it yourself does.
Nothing against those that lack the experience, the familiarity, or simply find doing it that way takes too much of their energy.
I suppose hoping for introspection was a tad foolish on my part. Ah well.
Don’t worry you’ll figure out introspection eventually. 😉
For a purist like me, arch IS the best distro.
However, best for me doesn’t mean best for thee.
